Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.